In this short but meaty book, Peter Unger questions the objective answers that have been given to central problems in philosophy. As Unger hypothesizes, many of these problems are unanswerable, including the problems of knowledge and scepticism, the problems of free will, and problems of causation and explanation. In each case, he argues, we arrive at one answer only relative to an assumption about the meaning of key terms, terms like "know" and like "cause," even while we arrive (...) at an opposite answer relative to quite different assumptions, but equally arbitrary assumptions, about what the key terms mean. (shrink)

What is it to be an agent? One influential line of thought, endorsed by G. E. M. Anscombe and David Velleman, among others, holds that agency depends on practical rationality—the ability to act for reasons, rather than being merely moved by causes. Over the past 25 years, Velleman has argued compellingly for a distinctive view of agency and the practical rationality with which he associates it. On Velleman’s conception, being an agent consists in having the capacity to be motivated by (...) a drive to act for reasons. Your bodily movements qualify as genuine actions insofar as they are motivated in part by your desire to behave in a way that makes sense to yourself. However, there are at least two distinct ways of spelling out what this drive towards self-intelligibility consists in, both present in Velleman’s work. It might consist in a drive towards intelligibility in causal-psychological terms: roughly, a drive to maximize the rational coherence of your psychological states. Alternatively, it might consist in a drive towards narrative intelligibility: a drive to make your ongoing activity conform to a recognizable narrative structure, where that structure is understood emotionally. Velleman originally saw these options as basically equivalent, but later came to prioritize the drive towards causal-psychological intelligibility over that towards narrative intelligibility. I argue that this gets things the wrong way round—we should instead understand our capacities to render ourselves intelligible in causal-psychological terms as built upon a bedrock of emotionally suffused narrative understanding. In doing so, we resolve several problems for Velleman’s view, and pave the way for an embodied, embedded and affective account of practical rationality and agency. According to the picture that emerges, practical rationality is essential to agency, narrative understanding is essential to practical rationality, and the rhythms and structures patterning the ebb and flow of our emotional lives are essential to narrative understanding. (shrink)

Neurotheology is a fast-growing field of research. Combining philosophy of mind, neuroscience, and religious studies, it takes a new approach to old questions on religion. What is religion and why do we have it? Neurotheologists focus on the search for the neural correlate of religious experiences. If we can trace religious experiences to specific parts of the brain, chances are we can reduce religion as such to that grey soggy matter as well. This article predicts neurotheology will not be able (...) to locate the neural correlate of religious experiences. As we cannot decide phenomenally what makes an experience religious, neurologically we cannot find its correlate either. That is, if there are fixed neural correlates to begin with, because their existence is still a matter of debate. In addition, religious experiences seem to be a kind of experience, like emotional or relational experiences, making them indistinguishable from similar nonreligious experiences. Even if one manages to trace the neural correlate of religious experiences, neurotheology will still not be able to account for the rise of religion without resorting to theories from other disciplines. In the end, we do not know enough about consciousness and the way it relates to the brain to make conclusive claims about the search for religious states of consciousness. It seems, however, that even though neurotheology could provide fascinating insights in the workings of the religious brain, on its own, it will prove unable to explain religion fully. (shrink)

Inner membranes of mitochondria are extensively folded, forming cristae. The observed overall correlation between efficient eukaryotic ATP generation and the area of internal mitochondrial inner membranes both in unicellular organisms and metazoan tissues seems to explain why they evolved. However, the crucial use of molecular oxygen (O2) as final acceptor of the electron transport chain is still not sufficiently appreciated. O2 was an essential prerequisite for cristae development during early eukaryogenesis and could be the factor allowing cristae retention upon loss (...) of mitochondrial ATP generation. Here I analyze illuminating bacterial and unicellular eukaryotic examples. I also discuss formative influences of intracellular O2 consumption on the evolution of the last eukaryotic common ancestor (LECA). These considerations bring about an explanation for the many genes coming from other organisms than the archaeon and bacterium merging at the start of eukaryogenesis. (shrink)

Volume 1 of Politics, a work in constructive social theory. Newly available, the complete work of Politicsa program for a comprehensive progressive alternative to the dominant ideologies of social democracy and neo-liberalismfrom one of the worlds leading social and political thinkers. False necessity is the central theme in the three-volume series Politics. It presents both a way of explaining society and a program for changing it. The explanation develops a radical alternative to Marxism, showing how we can account for established (...) social arrangements without denying their contingency or our freedom. The program offers a progressive alternative to the now-dominant ideological conceptions of neoliberalism and social democracy: a set of institutional innovations that would democratize markets, deepen democracy and empower individuals. For this new edition, Unger has written a comprehensive introduction that explores the limits of our understanding of society and our practice of politics, and reconsiders proposals contained in the book as special cases of a larger family of untried political possibilities. (shrink)

This introduction to a special issue of Topoi introduces and summarises the relationship between three main varieties of 'enactivist' theorising about the mind: 'autopoietic', 'sensorimotor', and 'radical' enactivism. It includes a brief discussion of the philosophical and cognitive scientific precursors to enactivist theories, and the relationship of enactivism to other trends in embodied cognitive science and philosophy of mind.

Ethical challenges in genomic epidemiology are the direct result of novel tools used to confront scientific challenges in the field. An orders-of-magnitude increase in scale of genetic data collection has created the need for establishing diffuse international partnerships, sometimes across developed- and developing-world countries, with ramifications for assigning research ownership, distributing intellectual property rights, and encouraging capacity-building. Meanwhile, the fact that genomic epidemiological research is so far upstream in the pipeline of therapy development has implications for the privacy rights of (...) research participants and for a rigorous definition of valid informed consent, particularly in resource-poor settings. From these scientific underpinnings, we distill out two main categories of ethical issues: (1) How should researchers ensure that the subjects of research are appropriately protected? and (2) What is the structure of an equitable and fair system for distributing the financial and scientific rewards of research? We attempt to delineate the contours of specific problems in each category and propose steps toward solutions with reference to a particular project, known as gMap.net, that focuses on genomic epidemiological studies of malaria. (shrink)

This article aims to demonstrate how the formation of ethical subjectivity must be considered in conjunction with the techno-politics of secrecy and disclosure, and it proposes an account of the ways in which the technical transition and ‘democratization’ of archival upload/download capacity associated with digital communications fundamentally challenges the existing structure of control over such things as censorship and cultural memory understood in terms of power of recall. It argues that it is against this background and in view of the (...) mediality of communications that the question of responsibility with respect to secrets and their disclosure must ultimately be posed. It seeks to establish the difference between a purely political and an ethico-political understanding of the secrecy/disclosure dyad as this functions, on the one hand, in relation to philosophical inquiry itself and, on the other, in relation to normative representations of informational events, and it contextualizes its theoretical account of this difference in relation to the ‘Wikileaks phenomenon’ viewed as a disclosive event. It examines how ethical subjectivity is formed in relation to ‘information’ and in the wider context of a digital culture of archivization, characterized by the ubiquitous recording of communications of all kinds. Drawing centrally on the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, for whom ‘infinite responsibility’ is ‘incarnated’ as the ‘ultimate secret of subjectivity’ in me, and Derrida’s account of both the necessary technicity of the human and the impossibility of ‘saying the event’, it proposes a way of thinking the ethico-techno-politics of secrecy and disclosure in terms of the singularity of the event and the unique responsibility of the ethical Subject in relation to that. (shrink)

Key texts on beauty and its revival in contemporary art.

Many teacher candidates get their first taste of life as a full-time teacher in their practicums, during which they confront a host of challenges, pedagogical and ethical. Because ethics is fundamental to the connection between teachers and students, teacher candidates are often required to negotiate dilemmas in ways that keep with the ethical ideals espoused both by the professional body and the community at large. Presenting the case of a teacher candidate who finds herself emotionally depleted in her devotion to (...) students, we look to the ethics of care and virtue for clarifying insights. Care ethics extols intersubjectivity and reciprocity, while virtue ethics enjoins commitment to a noble ideal for its own sake; both perspectives offer useful insights for our case. We argue that the perspectives and practices of contemplative traditions can facilitate the integration of care and virtue ethics, mitigating the risk of disruption in caring relations while minimizing the possibility of a personal p... (shrink)

In this quite modestly ambitious essay, I'll generally just assume that, for the most part, our "scientifically informed" commonsense view of the world is true. Just as it is with such unthinking things as planets, plates and, I suppose, plants, too, so it also is with all earthly thinking beings, from people to pigs and pigeons; each occupies a region of space, however large or small, in which all are spatially related to each other. Or, at least, so it is (...) with the bodies of these beings. And, even as each of these ordinary entities extends through some space, so, also, each endures through some time. In line with that, each ordinary entity is at least very largely, and is perhaps entirely, an enduring physical entity (which allows that many might have certain properties that aren't purely physical properties.) Further, each ordinary enduring entity is a physically complex entity: Not only is each composed of parts, but many of these parts, whether or not absolutely all of them, are themselves enduring physical entities, and many of them also are such physically complex continuing entities. When an ordinary entity undergoes a significant change, then, at least generally, this change will involve changes concerning that entity's constituting physical parts, whether it be a rearrangement of (some of) these parts, or a loss of parts, or a gain of parts, or whatever. Often, the entity will still exist even after the change occurs. As we may well suppose, this happens when, from two strokes of an ax, an ordinary log loses just a chip of wood. As we may then say, such a change conforms with the log's "persistence conditions." Somewhat less often, such an ordinary entity undergoes a change that means an end to it: When a bomb's explosion makes our log become just so many widely scattered motes of dust, the log will no longer exist. Such a momentous change doesn't conform with the log's persistence conditions. (shrink)

An eye-opening tour of the political tricks that subvert scientific progress. The Butter-Up and Undercut. The Certain Uncertainty. The Straight-Up Fabrication. Dave Levitan dismantles all of these deceptive arguments, and many more, in this probing and hilarious examination of the ways our elected officials attack scientific findings that conflict with their political agendas. The next time you hear a politician say, "Well, I’m not a scientist, but…," you’ll be ready.

Social and linguistic perceptions are linked. On one hand, talker identity affects speech perception. On the other hand, speech itself provides information about a talker's identity. Here, we propose that the same probabilistic knowledge might underlie both socially conditioned linguistic inferences and linguistically conditioned social inferences. Our computational–level approach—the ideal adapter—starts from the idea that listeners use probabilistic knowledge of covariation between social, linguistic, and acoustic cues in order to infer the most likely explanation of the speech signals they hear. (...) As a first step toward understanding social inferences in this framework, we use a simple ideal observer model to show that it would be possible to infer aspects of a talker's identity using cue distributions based on actual speech production data. This suggests the possibility of a single formal framework for social and linguistic inferences and the interactions between them. (shrink)

The development of immersive media-communication environments, and their theorization in terms of the `haptic', calls for a reconsideration of the relationship between sensuality and the ethics of contact. For the most part, the cultural theorization of the virtual which remains preoccupied with the visual has tended to limit its scope to the paradoxes, politics and ethics of representation. Much of media and cultural studies work, for instance, has adopted, directly or indirectly, the traditional visual and ocularcentric paradigm in its analyses (...) of cultural forms and technologies as these have become integrated into contemporary life. Whilst it has been argued, for instance by Mark Hansen in his recent books, that this paradigm is inadequate to digital media and the developments of human-machine interactions the digital introduces, few comentators have addressed how new developments in immersive sensory media environments bear on the ethics of communication. By way of a reflection on the themes of the tactility of contact and the ethics of touch in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, this article critically evaluates the ethical significance of the `sensory extension' haptic media represent. It identifies and argues against the neo-positivist tendency of Hansen's reliance on the empiricism of the neurosciences whilst locating the resources for an ethics of touch in Levinas' concept of time as `diachrony'. (shrink)

In this richly argued and provocative book, David Davies elaborates and defends a broad conceptual framework for thinking about the arts that reveals important continuities and discontinuities between traditional and modern art, and between different artistic disciplines. Elaborates and defends a broad conceptual framework for thinking about the arts. Offers a provocative view about the kinds of things that artworks are and how they are to be understood. Reveals important continuities and discontinuities between traditional and modern art. Highlights core topics (...) in aesthetics and art theory, including traditional theories about the nature of art, aesthetic appreciation, artistic intentions, performance, and artistic meaning. (shrink)

We present a specific elaboration and partial defense of the claims that cognition is enactive, embodied, embedded, affective and (potentially) extended. According to the view we will defend, the enactivist claim that perception and cognition essentially depend upon the cognizer’s interactions with their environment is fundamental. If a particular instance of this kind of dependence obtains, we will argue, then it follows that cognition is essentially embodied and embedded, that the underpinnings of cognition are inextricable from those of affect, that (...) the phenomenon of cognition itself is essentially bound up with affect, and that the possibility of cognitive extension depends upon the instantiation of a specific mode of skillful interrelation between cognizer and environment. Thus, if cognition is enactive then it is also embodied, embedded, affective and potentially extended. (shrink)

Shows how ethical subjectivity is not based on individual morals but contemporary cultureTaking his lead from the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, and engaging with a number of ethical thinkers, Dave Boothroyd addresses a number of key contemporary ethical subjects. In doing so, he reveals how responsibility is grounded in the everyday encounters and situations we are all familiar with.

What kind of symbiosis between archaeon and bacterium gave rise to their eventual merger at the origin of the eukaryotes? I hypothesize that conditions favouring bacterial uptake were based on exchange of intermediate carbohydrate metabolites required by recurring changes in availability and use of the two different terminal electron chain acceptors, the bacterial one being oxygen. Oxygen won, and definitive loss of the archaeal membrane potential allowed permanent establishment of the bacterial partner as the proto‐mitochondrion, further metabolic integration and highly (...) efficient ATP production. This represents initial symbiogenesis, when crucial eukaryotic traits arose in response to the archaeon‐bacterium merger. The attendant generation of internal reactive oxygen species (ROS) gave rise to a myriad of further eukaryotic adaptations, such as extreme mitochondrial genome reduction, nuclei, peroxisomes and meiotic sex. Eukaryotic origins could have started with shuffling intermediate metabolites as is still essential today. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetoric and Power: An Inquiry into Foucault’s Critique of ConfessionDave TellOn October 10, 1979, Michel Foucault revised his thesis on confession. On that day, some three years after the publication of his magisterial treatment of confession in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault argued that the Pythagoreans, Stoics, and Epicureans had, before the advent of Christianity, their own practices of confession. Yet these practices, unlike their (...) Christian variants, were not complicit with practices of domination (OS 310, 312). In the context of Foucault’s thought theretofore, in which the confession consistently figured as an essential component in the exercise of modern power, this is a radical shift. In lectures given at both Berkeley and Dartmouth in the fall of 1980, Foucault made similar arguments. On these occasions he argued that Seneca’s De ira constituted a “stoic confession,” the object of which was to enable the subject to “live differently, better, more happily, than other people” (AB 210, 205). Judith Butler captures the gravity of the shift: “In the last years of his life, Foucault returned to the question of confession, reversing his earlier critique in the first volume of the History of Sexuality, where he indicts confession as a forcible extraction of sexual truth, a practice in the service of a regulatory power” (2005, 112).This reversal was short lived. Although Foucault would celebrate ancient Greek techniques of the self for the rest of his life, he would not [End Page 95] long refer to these techniques in terms of confession. Thus, in another reading of De ira, this one in March 1982, Foucault again noted that the Stoics have “confessional practices” that are “very close to what is found in Christianity” (Herm 482). This time, however, he insisted that the Stoic practices were fundamentally different: “However, all these elements seem to me to be profoundly different from what we should call ‘confession’ in the strict, or anyway, spiritual sense of the word” (Herm 365). In The Care of the Self, Foucault again conceded that De ira—what he now called “the most detailed description” of antique practices of the self—looked “at first glance” like a Christian confession, but he again maintained that it is something quite different: “The purpose of the examination is not therefore to discover one’s own guilt, down to its most trifling forms” (CS 61–62). Foucault concluded that the various “discourses of the self”—the confession and the Greek techniques of the self—could not be placed into a single category (see GE 250). Indeed, the “profound difference” (Herm 299) between these two discourses of the self was perhaps Foucault’s most repeated claim of the 1980s (see Herm 222, 237–44, 299, 308; GE 247–48; WS 237; AB 207–8; RFT 27; UP 89; CS 239; SS 5; FI 5, 12; FS 30, 35, 44, 87, 96, 97, 143–45, 147).It is worth asking why Foucault returned so consistently to the distinction between these two discursive forms. This question gains even more relevance for readers of this journal when we remember that, on at least two occasions, Foucault defined one of these forms, the ancient techniques of the self, in terms of its opposition to rhetoric: the techniques of the self, he claimed, are “nonrhetorical” (Herm 368; FS 20). Thus the question that drives this essay is not so much why Foucault attached such importance to the distinction but rather how rhetoric itself might differentiate the confession from the techniques of the self. Stated differently, Foucault’s work on the confession vis-à-vis the technologies of the self provides a valuable opportunity to study the role of rhetoric in Foucault’s thought—not because they are both rhetorical forms but, curiously, because Foucault insists that one is not.In order to foreground the work of rhetoric in Foucault’s thought, I situate his discourses of the self in the context of Nietzsche’s critique of metonymy. Although this may seem arbitrary, it gains initial plausibility from three facts. First, we know that Foucault understood rhetoric in terms of tropes (OT 84; Cooper 1988, 4). Second, we know too that Foucault had a deep... (shrink)

How do questions concerning consciousness and phenomenal experience relate to, or interface with, questions concerning plans, knowledge and intentions? At least in the case of visual experience the relation, we shall argue, is tight. Visual perceptual experience, we shall argue, is fixed by an agent’s direct unmediated knowledge concerning her poise (or apparent poise) over a currently enabled action space. An action space, in this specific sense, is to be understood not as a fine-grained matrix of possibilities for bodily movement, (...) but as a matrix of possibilities for pursuing and accomplishing one’s intentional actions, goals and projects. If this is correct, the links between planning, intention and perceptual experience are tight, while (contrary to some recent accounts invoking the notion of ‘sensorimotor expectations’) the links between embodied activity and perceptual experience, though real, are indirect. What matters is not bodily activity itself, but our practical knowledge (which need not be verbalized or in any way explicit) of our own possibilities for action. Such knowledge, selected, shaped and filtered by the grid of plans, goals, and intentions, plays, we argue, a constitutive role in explaining the content and character of visual perceptual experience. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetoric and Power: An Inquiry into Foucault’s Critique of ConfessionDave TellOn October 10, 1979, Michel Foucault revised his thesis on confession. On that day, some three years after the publication of his magisterial treatment of confession in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault argued that the Pythagoreans, Stoics, and Epicureans had, before the advent of Christianity, their own practices of confession. Yet these practices, unlike their (...) Christian variants, were not complicit with practices of domination (OS 310, 312). In the context of Foucault’s thought theretofore, in which the confession consistently figured as an essential component in the exercise of modern power, this is a radical shift. In lectures given at both Berkeley and Dartmouth in the fall of 1980, Foucault made similar arguments. On these occasions he argued that Seneca’s De ira constituted a “stoic confession,” the object of which was to enable the subject to “live differently, better, more happily, than other people” (AB 210, 205). Judith Butler captures the gravity of the shift: “In the last years of his life, Foucault returned to the question of confession, reversing his earlier critique in the first volume of the History of Sexuality, where he indicts confession as a forcible extraction of sexual truth, a practice in the service of a regulatory power” (2005, 112).This reversal was short lived. Although Foucault would celebrate ancient Greek techniques of the self for the rest of his life, he would not [End Page 95] long refer to these techniques in terms of confession. Thus, in another reading of De ira, this one in March 1982, Foucault again noted that the Stoics have “confessional practices” that are “very close to what is found in Christianity” (Herm 482). This time, however, he insisted that the Stoic practices were fundamentally different: “However, all these elements seem to me to be profoundly different from what we should call ‘confession’ in the strict, or anyway, spiritual sense of the word” (Herm 365). In The Care of the Self, Foucault again conceded that De ira—what he now called “the most detailed description” of antique practices of the self—looked “at first glance” like a Christian confession, but he again maintained that it is something quite different: “The purpose of the examination is not therefore to discover one’s own guilt, down to its most trifling forms” (CS 61–62). Foucault concluded that the various “discourses of the self”—the confession and the Greek techniques of the self—could not be placed into a single category (see GE 250). Indeed, the “profound difference” (Herm 299) between these two discourses of the self was perhaps Foucault’s most repeated claim of the 1980s (see Herm 222, 237–44, 299, 308; GE 247–48; WS 237; AB 207–8; RFT 27; UP 89; CS 239; SS 5; FI 5, 12; FS 30, 35, 44, 87, 96, 97, 143–45, 147).It is worth asking why Foucault returned so consistently to the distinction between these two discursive forms. This question gains even more relevance for readers of this journal when we remember that, on at least two occasions, Foucault defined one of these forms, the ancient techniques of the self, in terms of its opposition to rhetoric: the techniques of the self, he claimed, are “nonrhetorical” (Herm 368; FS 20). Thus the question that drives this essay is not so much why Foucault attached such importance to the distinction but rather how rhetoric itself might differentiate the confession from the techniques of the self. Stated differently, Foucault’s work on the confession vis-à-vis the technologies of the self provides a valuable opportunity to study the role of rhetoric in Foucault’s thought—not because they are both rhetorical forms but, curiously, because Foucault insists that one is not.In order to foreground the work of rhetoric in Foucault’s thought, I situate his discourses of the self in the context of Nietzsche’s critique of metonymy. Although this may seem arbitrary, it gains initial plausibility from three facts. First, we know that Foucault understood rhetoric in terms of tropes (OT 84; Cooper 1988, 4). Second, we know too that Foucault had a deep... (shrink)

How should accounts that stress the embodied, embedded and engaged character of human minds accommodate the role of rationality in human subjectivity? Drawing on Matthew Boyle’s contrast between ‘additive’ and ‘transformative’ conceptions of rationality, I argue that contemporary work on embodied cognition tends towards a problematic ‘additivism’ about the relationship between mature human capacities to think and act for reasons, and sensorimotor capacities to skillfully engage with salient features of the environment. Additivists view rational capacities to reason and reflect as (...) a distinct ‘layer’ or ‘storey’ of human cognition, with a normative structure that differs from that of the sensorimotor coping skills which support it. I argue that emphasizing the embodied and engaged character of human minds is better combined with a ‘transformative’ conception of rationality – one which holds that acquiring abilities to give and ask for reasons transforms the normative structure of our unreflective embodied dealings with the environment. And I argue that a transformative embodied cognitive science of human rationality is not only possible, but underway. Integrating existing work on embodied cognition with work on the cultural and developmental contexts that shape human minds suggests how human immersion in culture transforms the structure of sensorimotor engagements by bringing about the communicability and negotiability of the meanings to which those engagements attune us. (shrink)

Clinical research with adults who are unable to provide informed consent has the potential to improve understanding and care of a number of devastating conditions. This research also has the potential to exploit some of society's most vulnerable members. Recently, a number of task forces and individual writers have proposed guidelines to ensure that such research is both possible and ethical. Yet, there is widespread disagreement over which safeguards should be adopted. In the present paper, I consider to what extent (...) these disagreements can be resolved by appeal to a general account of the interests of subjects who are unable to consent and the conditions that must be satisfied for research enrollment to constitute exploitation of their inability to make their own decisions. (shrink)

Clinical research with adults who are unable to provide informed consent has the potential to improve understanding and care of a number of devasting conditions. This research also has the potential to exploit some of society's most vulnerable members. Recently, a number of task forces and individual writers have proposed guidelines to ensure that such research is both possible and ethical. Yet, there is widespread disagreement over which safeguards should be adopted. In the present paper, I consider to what extent (...) these disagreements can be resolved by appeal to a general account of the interests of subjects who are unable to consent and the conditions that must be satisfied for research enrollment to constitute exploitation of their inability to make their own decisions. (shrink)

The philosophical literature would have us believe that the conservative view on abortion is based on the claim that the fetus is a person from the time of conception. Given the widespread acceptance of this analysis, it comes as something of a surprise to learn that it conflicts with a number of major arguments offered in support of the conservative view. I argue, in the present paper, that a careful examination of these inconsistencies establishes that the personhood analysis is mistaken: (...) the conservative view is based on the natural process of fetal development, not the personhood of the fetus. (shrink)

I shall characterize normative functionalism and contrast it with its causal counterpart. After tracing both stripes of functionalism to the work of the classical American pragmatists, I then argue that they are not exclusive alternatives. Instead, both might be required for an appropriately illuminating account of human rational activity.

Abstract:Although inquiry-based instruction has been a centerpiece of progressive visions of social studies education almost since its inception as a school subject a century ago, teachers often struggle to conceptualize it in ways that make true inquiry possible for their students. In this essay I suggest that social educators strengthen their connection with John Dewey’s pragmatic epistemology as the foundation of inquiry-based teaching in social studies, arguing in support of an approach that holds the promise of advancing goals associated with (...) meaningful democratic citizenship education. (shrink)